Do pawns disregard Einstein?

Un-Einsteinian

[Note that Jon Speelman also looks at the content of the article in video format, here embedded at the end of the article.]

I was idly watching a fairly random blitz game recently when one of the players had to underpromote. Of course, he had ‘autopromote’ set and there was a significant pause while he sorted himself out and was in fact in time to complete the underpromotion and win before he was flagged.

Since I don’t play bullet (no problem with speed of thought, but not fast enough with a mouse) I choose not to autopromote. This has cost me the occasional blitz game, but it does make online chess seem slightly more like the “real” over the board version, and is in some ways fitting. After all, a pawn promotion is a huge event in a chess game, as the energy garnered by the pawn advancing up the board is transformed in a most un-Einsteinian way (surely a pawn’s advance doesn’t create that much energy) into serious amounts of matter.

A fortnight ago, I looked at some pawn “avalanches” in which a player gave up a considerable amount of material to get a phalanx of passed pawns which overwhelmed the enemy. Readers kindly suggested some more of these, and I’m looking at them today. We’ve also got a chess game by Einstein himself against the “father of the atomic bomb” Robert Oppenheimer. I’ve also looked at a moment from the recent Norway Chess Tournament where while promoting  and beating Magnus Carlsen, Sergey Karjakin had to be very exact.

Select an entry from the list to switch between games

Master Class Vol.11: Vladimir Kramnik

This DVD allows you to learn from the example of one of the best players in the history of chess and from the explanations of the authors (Pelletier, Marin, Müller and Reeh) how to successfully organise your games strategically, consequently how to keep y

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